04/30/2010

Day Two: Trails and the Barn

I woke up pretty sore this morning, so I decided to skip the feeding and have an easy start. I played with the baby goats and cuddled with the barn cats before a late morning trail ride on Lucy.

Lucy and I were in the rear, because while she is a great and responsive horse, she's a bit of a bitch and likes to kick. I appreciated her.

Yes, I know the puffy vest is unflattering, but it was warm and has good pockets. I was covered in dirt today!

This is one of the areas that we rode through. We rode for just about three hours I think... my sit-bones and knees were screaming at me so I was happy to get back to the ranch for lunch. I had a great time on Lucy though, and I'm hoping to do some arena work tomorrow with her or another reining horse.

It was a chilly overcast afternoon so I declined the kayaking offer and decided to hang out in the barn. I wanted to groom some horses! Most of them have been up on the mountain for most of the winter and hadn't had much pampering, so it was a fun task. I only really got three of them really well but that took up a few hours.

This is the filly and mama Daisy who is about ready to foal....

Isn't she huge? I spent a lot of time loving on her this afternoon, every time I tried to brush the filly she'd rub up against me, as well she should, what a back ache she must have!

The barn is full of all kinds of animals. Mr. Handsome the bottle-fed calf, crazy eyed alien goat, Rodney the billy goat, a variety of cows and a bull, half dozen cats, more chickens and roosters than any barn ever needed, a peacock, two baby goats, a few dogs, and of course, the horses.

I loved spending time in the barn working with the animals! And I've really enjoyed getting to know Jenny from Germany, the wrangler here to work for the summer.

This afternoon some more guests arrived a family of ladies (three generations) from Seattle. I'm happy to have more folks around, I felt like there was too much attention on me as the only guest and I'd rather observe than be the focus.

The longhorns came out with the new guests, they were just hanging out in the front lawn! Kinda freaked me out at first, but apparently they are friendly. We also walked some of the dogs that are boarding here with Dr. June, the local vet. Walk is a relative term. I had a couple 50lb poodles pulling me kell nell across the whole pasture and wrapping their leashes all around me. The other folks thought it was hilarious, I thought it was exhausting! After that we were going to bottle feed some baby animals when we got word that the cows were out in the neighbors pasture, again.

So we jumped in the truck with wrangler John and rode down here....

Those are actually some pretty large outbuildings with the cattle corral beyond it. The cows have free range of the mountains up above. But they wandered to the far right and mowed down a barbed wire fence to get into the green grass. Poor John had just fixed this fence today from the breakout last night, but the cows went over it again. Ain't nothing gonna stand between a mama cow and green grass.

So we had to walk all the way down there to the furthest cow and push them all back into the corral for the night til the fence can be repaired.

And that was my day. And boy do my feet hurt, and my back, and my butt, and my knees. Now it's 11:15 and I'm going to go to sleep so I can do it all again tomorrow! Yeehaw!!!